Gabbler: COGS rate GODs is back, baby. What was supposed to be a series never took off. But here we are for a relaunch. But much lower pressure!
BLA: Hell yeah. What’s funny is our series came out the same month and year as John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed. Ratings were a big thing back then amongst humans, I guess? Still are.
G: But we’re not reviewing human things. We’re reviewing the gods.
B: Which span past and future epochs!
G: In anticipation of the Chthulucene.
B: No sky gods!
G: Don’t say that too loudly. So, our first review was of daddy Vulcan. Hephaestus. He got 5/5 stars. This time around we’re reviewing…Zagreus.
B: You picked, for the record.
G: I did. Because that Hades II game just came out and, well, we have some feelings about what we’ve seen.
B: We haven’t played it. Only seen it.
G: Right. But he’s such an interesting figure. Especially in terms of his parentage—how people disagree about who, like, his dad is.
B: And how he was the first-born Dionysus.
G: Born again, you might say, right?
B: Sure. But I argue it’s supposed to be mysterious—that we’re not supposed have definitive answers. You don’t have to think too hard on it and I feel like the gods Themselves aren’t sure about everything. They were still trying to figure Their own Selves out. Basically, and without listing off all the things you could find on a Wikipedia page, Zagreus’s mother was Persephone.
G: Or at least some underworld goddess.
B: The real question is of the father—which we’ll get to. But what everyone can agree on is that, like the later Dionysus, he was torn apart. Into pieces. But some part of him is saved. You see this even referenced in a TV show like The Magicians. Some say the heart was saved and that later, somehow, gets put into Semele or Zeus and therefore transferred to the baby Dionysus when he’s “carrying” him and that’s how you get this newer version of Dionysus.
G: Sounds like the Osiris myth, with the saving of the parts and such.
B: Exactly. But we need to address the parentage thing. So, some say that Zeus is Zagreus’s father. But how can that be if Hades is Persephone’s consort? Very incesty. But Zeus is also just a title of “King” in some respects. Hades is the Zeus of the underworld. So, some argue, it wasn’t Zeus-Zeus but Hades who fathered Zagreus. Maybe things got misinterpreted. But I think it’s more complicated than that. Gods can often be the same being. Alter-ego combinations of each other. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades. All kings of their domains. A trinity, if you will.
G: A god-head three in one. Kind of like in your next book—not to give anything away.
B: Yeah. Volume 3 coming soon! The gods shift and combine themselves all the time. And Their names flow to and fro from each other, to help explain themselves in a point and time.
G: And not to excuse incest, but that’s kind of standard with the gods. An act of siring the self over and over in different iterations, even. Gaia is both mother and consort to Uranus. Gaia births Rhea, who births Demeter. And they’re all pretty similar. Sometimes they show up like patterns instead of through parentage. Like Athena and Selene. Or Apollo and Helios. But Persephone, daughter of Demeter, is not just of the earth but a queen of what is under it. Does she disrupt this looping?
B: Possibly. There often does seem to be a final refinement with her. Like, the final girl™ of this pattern.
G: Which you know all about—refinement.
B: The Lathe doth wear down to nothingness. Rhea, Demeter, Persephone is another trinity of sorts. So, when folks also argue that Zagreus is another name for Hades or Dionysus, it might be the same attempt to combine the namesake, powers, or dominion of three gods, or a god acting in the stead of the other. My take is that the parents don’t matter. It’s a mystery the gods want us to forget. Otherwise they would have been clearer.
G: Origins are often very complicated in myth. Like, Google Erichthonius and tell me there isn’t more than one mother there.
B: Like Athena birthed from Zeus’s head is comparable to Dionysus birthed from Zeus’s thigh, you arguably can have a mother-father in one even.
G: His birth is, yes, interesting, but I’m more interested in Zagreus as a god that dies, though. That is torn apart like an animal. He seems to be the hunter and the hunted. That symbology is very beautiful, and bound to be tied somehow to the reason the Orphics didn’t eat meat? I’m still working on my thesis for that.
B: I’m more interested in folks picking up on the fact that a god can be an individual and their parents. In the more recent Dionysus myth, Zeus saves the baby from Semele (after he kills her) and attaches the baby to himself—his thigh. Dionysus is a grape on the vine of Zeus. Gestation. No mother really needed, and perhaps Dionysus, once part of Zeus, is now cut from the same literal vine. But in that same vein, Zeus was said to have consumed the heart of Zagreus, or made Semele consume it. And thus that transferred—reincarnated—Zagreus into Dionysus. Twice-born in more ways than one.
G: That’s spooky similar to Alpha, in what we see in Volume 2 of The Blacksmith’s Circus series.
B: No spoilers.
G: No spoilers.
B: What I find most important about Zagreus/Dionysus, if we are wanting to review both at once, is that we see a demi-god become a full god.
G: I think Dionysus should still get his own category. Zagreus is like his own person, before becoming Dionysus.
B: OK, I’ll save that review for another time. But for this particular guy. Three stars.
G: Only three stars?
B: Mysteries only get three stars because there’s too much up for interpretation. ⭐⭐⭐
G: Fair, I guess. I say four stars. Because Dionysus is just such an interesting figure. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
B: But we’re not reviewing Dionysus!
G: Fair, fair. But I love me some Orphism and ancient context on those who refused to eat animals. Like, the Maenads—the followers of Dionysus—rip animals and people apart with their bare hands. Just like Zagreus was torn apart, so is Orpheus. Even though Dionysus is so liberating to women – he is even called The Liberator – and allows them to become wild hunters, he forces his once-follower to be treated the way he was treated. In some ways, it’s like Zagreus is doing the tearing apart this time. Is sparagmos always a punishment, or a can it be a way for this god to reclaim you? To integrate you into his myth? To make you more like him? Is Orpheus just an embodiment of Dionysus? Can’t we all be possessed Dionysus/Zagreus to some degree when taken by his frenzy?
B: See, too many questions. Much like Orpheus, I, too, am a character in the deconstruction of worshipping a god. You see rites and the retellings become more and more human. Mythical figures become archetypes. A type of incarnation.
G: I think we need to end there before you start to give too much away for Volume 3. Until next time!
B: Zagreus, you get an average of 3.5 stars.
⭐⭐⭐.5
“Good literature is often evocative, using imagery and metaphor to stimulate the imagination rather than prosaic description to satisfy the intellect. This has the great advantage of enabling the reader to enter creatively into the experience of the author, and more than outweighs the resultant imprecision and possible misunderstanding. But of course imagery by its very nature cannot be pressed too far. Old Testament descriptions of death are often imaginative and evocative rather than prosaic and specific. This allows us to understand the ancient Israelites’ attitudes to death more than their beliefs about it. Nevertheless, the imagery and metaphor used inevitably reflect certain beliefs, and it is useful to attempt to trace these.
In Norse mythology, there is a story of a supernatural wolf called Fenrir. He is the god Loki’s son and, at first, he lives with the gods. But he becomes worryingly large and powerful and they decide to bind him. After he breaks free from a series of increasingly robust physical chains, the gods control him by binding him with Gleipnir, a magic fetter of paradoxes: the breath of a fish, the beard of a woman, the sound of a cat walking. These dreamlike, impossible ideas seem analogous to me to the intangible laws, rules, and political boundaries that determine where wolves exist today. I’ve always wondered why the gods didn’t just kill the threatening Fenrir, why they preferred a bound wolf to a dead wolf. Today, using GPS collars and tranquilizer darts and ‘wolf plans’ as our fetter, we seem to have made the same choice.